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African Colonial Soldiers, Memories and Imagining Migration in Senegal in the Twenty-first Century Martin Mourre

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African Colonial Soldiers, Memories and Imagining Migration in Senegal in the Twenty-first Century Martin Mourre Africa 88 (3) 2018: 518–38 doi:10.1017/S0001972018000207 African colonial soldiers, memories and imagining migration in Senegal in the twenty-first century Martin Mourre In 1996, for several months, African immigrants in France occupied the Saint- Bernard church in the 18th arrondissement of the French capital.1 These men and women, who initially lacked resources, succeeded in gaining support among a sector of the public for their demands for the administrative regularization of their situation (Blin 2005). Among the arguments they put forward, one was rooted in a common history shared between two spaces, Africa and France. More precisely, these ‘sans papiers’ (people without papers or ID) felt that it was necessary to draw on the history of the African soldiers recruited into the French army in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, known under the generic name of Senegalese tirailleurs.2 This argument of the ‘blood debt’, which emerged at the end of World War One, had particular echoes in West Africa.3 Another anecdote shows how the issue of migration is interwoven with a similar colonial past, this time on the other side of the Mediterranean. From 2006 onwards, the news has been dominated by the tragic departure of thousands of young Africans trying to leave the continent in the hope of a better life, and Senegal became one of the ‘hubs’ of this immigration, in particular on its coasts, where migrants embarked on pirogues, especially from a village on the out- skirts of Dakar called Thiaroye-sur-Mer. The Socialist Party candidate in the French presidential elections in 2007, Ségolène Royal, who was level pegging in the race to be head of state, travelled to this village to discuss the question of migration and to support the mothers of families, some of whom had lost a son during the sea crossing to Europe. Following this visit, the village of Thiaroye- sur-Mer became one of the symbols of this informal immigration (Bouilly 2008). Three years later, Royal again visited this suburb of Dakar. The speech she made on this occasion was largely a response to the speech given by President Sarkozy in 2007 at Cheikh Anta Diop University and deemed by Martin Mourre is a postdoctoral researcher attached to the German Historical Institute and to the Centre de Recherche sur les Politiques Sociales (CREPOS). He is based in Dakar, where he is researching former soldiers from 1945 to 1975. Email: [email protected] This article was translated from the French by Andrew Brown. The original French version is available as supplementary material with the online version of this article. See <https://doi.org/ 10.1017/S0001972018000207>. 1The Saint-Bernard church is located in the Goutte d’Or district in Paris, an ethnically mixed area whose population comes largely from the Maghreb, West Africa and Central Africa. 2The Senegalese tirailleurs (infantrymen) were African soldiers recruited by France and consti- tuted as a military corps in 1857 at the request of Louis Faidherbe. These men were mainly from the territories of French West Africa. The word ‘tirailleur’ used for the Senegalese gradually became more widely accepted and has been a generic term from the beginning of the twentieth century. Two important studies on these men are Echenberg (1991) and Mann (2006). 3See the particularly significant work by the Malian historian Bakary Kamian (2001). © International African Institute 2018 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.35.76, on 30 Sep 2021 at 21:35:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972018000207 Soldiers’ memories in Senegal 519 several commentators to be insulting to Africans (Ba Konaré 2009; Chrétien 2008).4 It referred to a drama in colonial history that has left a particularly vivid imprint in Senegal, although it is all but unknown in France: the Thiaroye massacre. In 1944, in this village, home to one of the largest military camps in French West Africa, there was a massacre of Senegalese tirailleurs who had returned from Europe and were slaughtered by their French superiors for demand- ing their war-time salaries.5 In today’s Senegal, this drama has become one of the most eloquent symbols of colonial injustice (Mourre 2017a). These two anecdotes, involving West African migrants and the international agenda of one French politician, Ségolène Royal, show that even several decades after independence, the history of the tirailleurs, on different levels, is still an element in a common language shared by France and West Africa. They reveal a collective memory in constant evolution. This language, which feeds into many aspects of public life, is deployed by different actors, but what seems to guarantee its effectiveness is that it is integrated into the imaginaires of both France and Senegal. Following the arguments developed by Cornelius Castoriadis in his book The Imaginary Institution of Society (1987), this article is an attempt to reconsider the representations that, in Senegal in the 2000s, linked the social history of the tirailleurs with the practical and symbolic processes at the heart of a number of migratory projects, especially among young people. From this point of view, the imaginaire, ‘active as such, is situated at a level differ- ent from any functional determination’ (ibid.: 130). For Castoriadis, whose per- spective seeks to go beyond a structural-Marxist understanding of the social, the individual unconscious as rooted in a collective ‘social-historical’ lies at the heart of the analysis: ‘what holds a society together is the holding-together of its world of significations’ (ibid.: 359). Focusing on the memories of the African fighters of the French Empire thus means taking on board notions such as honour, courage and suffering, which today constitute powerful binding forces in the repre- sentations of the imaginaire of migration in Senegal. These representations always produce definite effects. In the mid-2000s, a slogan was attributed to the young people of Senegal: ‘Barça or Barzakh [barsaq]’–that is, see Barcelona (Barça being the local football club, a metonym of Europe), or die (Barzakh meaning ‘the next world’ in Wolof). Death was thus preferred to the social shame of staying in the country,without any future. However, I argue that, in addition to socio-economic factors, the different strata relating to Franco-African and Senegalese collective history must be integrated in any analysis of these migrations of despair. In the first part of this article, I show how, for a period of over eighty years, from the end of World War One, a discourse on the ‘blood debt’ was developed. This 4It was in this speech that Nicolas Sarkozy, elected in 2007, uttered a sentence that was widely interpreted as marking a resurgence of essentialist prejudices about Africa. He said that ‘the drama of Africa [was that] African man has not sufficiently entered history’. Moreover, it should be noted that, in metropolitan France, the years of the Sarkozy presidency were marked by a series of declarations aimed against immigrant communities, the framework of the debate being an ‘immigration that was chosen’ as opposed to an ‘immigration that was endured’. 5There is some uncertainty over the actual number of fatalities; the figure of thirty-five deaths often put forward in the colonial archives seems an underestimate. The exact place where the tirailleurs were buried is also controversial. For further information on this brutal repression, see Mourre (2017a). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.35.76, on 30 Sep 2021 at 21:35:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972018000207 520 Martin Mourre language of reciprocity and obligation, however asymmetrical, was articulated by the French state and its veterans but also by an entire group of political actors, both French and Senegalese.6 Moreover, after the arrival of Abdoulaye Wade in 2000, the figure of the tirailleur was widely drawn on in Senegalese public space, especially because of the tragedy of Thiaroye. The memorializing policies of the Senegalese state led it to construct an image of the tirailleur that triggered a new process, shaped by the binary ‘hero–victim’. This process was concomitant with the emergence of another figure in Senegalese society: the migrant. This figure took shape more clearly after independence, just as ‘Senegalese tirailleurs’ were disappearing as a social body. By bringing together colonial and postcolonial temporality, a study of how these representations were constructed may help us better understand some of the bases of the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 2016)7 in Senegal. In the second part, I trace the ways in which studies on migra- tion in France and Senegal have gradually shifted towards a focus on the subjec- tivities of the actors, mainly on the basis of bibliographical details. In the third part, I first put forward some methodological proposals to account for these migratory imaginaires and then show how some of the dominant representa- tions of these tirailleurs are being reactivated by the younger generation in dis- courses on migration. The gradual establishment of the figure of the tirailleur A brief Franco-Senegalese view of representations of the tirailleur,from World War One to the 2000s It is not easy to briefly outline the history of the military and social body of the tir- ailleurs, which, strictly speaking, lasted from 1857 to 1962.8 On the eve of World War One, the French authorities decided to recruit huge numbers of African sol- diers to counter the demographic weight of Germany.9 While there were 6,000 African soldiers in 1900, almost 200,000 recruits from ‘Black Africa’ ultimately fought in the war on the French side (Michel 2003: 18, 191).
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